Abstract
The emancipatory overthrow of capitalism requires a critique of the state. Marx provided a critique of the political economy but only left fragments of a theory and critique of the state. In this book, Zeiler sketches key strands of a ‘materialist’ critique of the state. As such, the volume is meant to be a non-exhaustive and descriptive rather than interpretive introduction to inspire and enable deeper engagement with the topic. This review provides an overview of the key topics captured in the book.
Marx had planned a book on the state within his enormous, unfinished research programme and in his view, forms of the state had to be understood in the context of the material conditions in which they emerge. In the absence of a definitive critique by Marx, Engels produced one of the most influential writings on the state among 19th century social democrats. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), he sets out a deterministic historical process with three stages of human development, characterised by increasingly efficient modes of production with a division of labour that lead to exploitation and the formation of classes.
Building on Marx’s mode of analysis in Kapital, one set of theorists carries out ‘form’ analyses of the state, tracing the relationship between commodity form, legal form and state form. Evgeny Paschukanis pioneered this work in the 1930s, asking why capitalist class domination takes the form of impersonal power rather than, for example, that of direct personal domination by the governing class. Monetisation of tithes and the extension of the market de-personalise the feudal power relationship, which is increasingly replaced by legal contract and formal legal equality. Protection of private property and equality before the law implies the acceptance of material inequality. The law codifies social relationships and gives rise to a fetishism of the law that sees the law as natural and without alternative.
In this broad tradition, Heide Gerstenberger (2006) sets out the historical emergence of the bourgeois state and the evolution of the power relationship from personal power, vested in a person with a status of power, to impersonal power, vested in the state and its institutions. Rejecting a simplistic structural functionalism and materialism, she identifies the specific historical conditions and drivers that underpinned this development in which appropriation by force is replaced by appropriation through market and contract. In particular, she isolates the stage of the absolutist ‘ancien régime’ in the evolution from feudalism to capitalism, which establishes the roots for the impersonal expression of power.
The emergence of fascism posed a new challenge to critical state theory. Far from being dependent on bourgeois liberalism, fascism demonstrated the compatibility of capitalism with an illiberal, authoritarian state. During the Weimar Republic, the German Communist Party interpreted the rise of fascism through the crude lens of the ‘social fascism’ thesis, whereby fascism was an instrument of the bourgeoisie (including social democrats) against the proletariat. Social democratic parties analysed fascism as ‘bonapartism’ and an authoritarian solution to the crisis of the state. Going beyond economic explanations, the Frankfurt School theorised the practice of the fascist state that is not subject to any kind of law and in which the market is replaced with planning by an elite of industry, military, party and bureaucracy.
The resilience of the capitalist state in the face of its own contradictions has been the focus of theories of hegemony. Antonio Gramsci describes the whole institutional and societal complex by which the leading class justifies and maintains its power with the active consensus of the led. The processes of civil society maintain the social and cultural hegemony of the capitalist class and legitimise the repressive state. In a similar vein, for Louis Althusser the state is a unity of ideology and repression. He stresses the role of the education system in transmitting the dominant ideology. Nicos Poulantzas emphasises the role of the law in legitimising power and points to the contradictory forces at work within the state apparatus. The complexity of power relations means that the democratic path to socialism requires an array of approaches which combine participation in representative democracy with an extension of structures of self-governance.
A final, key strand in the left-wing criticism of the state is anarchism. It rejects the rule of (wo)man over (wo)man, but is grounded less in a theory of the state than radical action and practice. The anarchist debate turns on two central aspects: the state as a relationship of force that requires active destruction and the state as social relationship (above and beyond its coercive aspects), which is upheld by everyone’s daily activity and requires the erection of alternative structures and self-administration outside the state.
In his conclusion, Zeiler sets out some topical challenges that require theoretical elaboration. The current political situation demonstrates that criticism of the capitalist state is not a preserve of the left–right-wing authoritarian responses, grounded in and strengthening national myths and traditions of the state stand in opposition to the fundamentally state-critical posture of the left. However, most left responses do not aim at an emancipatory dissolution of state repression but accept state structures and, in many cases, amount to little more than an appeal for an ‘enlightened’ lifestyle. The superficial treatment of systemic mechanisms thus illustrates the need for a thorough theoretical underpinning, based on a clear understanding of the forces of capitalism and the foundations of the capitalist state, its embeddedness in the global market, nationalism and the reproduction of social and power relationships.
Zeiler’s book is a quick and enjoyable introduction to the topic and worth a read. It provides a short but panoramic exposition of the critical approaches to the capitalist state and prompts the reader to investigate further the topics that peak her interests.